YouTube can effec­tive­ly shift a num­ber of your most impor­tant brand­ing met­rics. The key is to decide what suc­cess looks like and then trans­late that into met­rics that are rel­e­vant for your brand. Now, there are a num­ber of met­rics that might work for your busi­ness. Whichev­er ones you end up focus­ing on, you should look beyond “views.”

For the past sev­en weeks, we’ve been look­ing at dif­fer­ent ways to improve your video mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy. In the final part of this series, we’ll look at mea­sure­ment, which is the key to defin­ing suc­cess and then opti­miz­ing toward it.

There was a time when the only met­ric that mat­tered to senior mar­keters was see­ing the YouTube view count tick­ing up. But those days are long gone. Mar­keters are increas­ing­ly chal­leng­ing the val­ue of a view and instead are focus­ing on cre­at­ing con­tent and dis­tri­b­u­tion strate­gies which dri­ve deep­er lev­els of engage­ment, such as video shar­ing, lead gen­er­a­tion, or online pur­chas­es.

The Power Of Recommended Videos

For exam­ple, recent research has found that social video rec­om­men­da­tions sig­nif­i­cant­ly impact tra­di­tion­al brand met­rics.

A study con­duct­ed by Deci­pher Research sur­veyed online video view­ers aged 18–34 across four social video cam­paigns from Guin­ness, Coca-Cola, Unilever’s Cor­net­to, and Ener­giz­er Bat­ter­ies. It sought to deter­mine the impact of peer rec­om­men­da­tions. And this social ad effec­tive­ness study found that rec­om­men­da­tions dra­mat­i­cal­ly increased ad per­for­mance.

View­ers enjoyed rec­om­mend­ed videos more than non-rec­om­mend­ed videos: there was a 14 per­cent increase in the num­ber of peo­ple who enjoyed the video fol­low­ing a rec­om­men­da­tion ver­sus those who had dis­cov­ered it by brows­ing. More­over, a rec­om­men­da­tion reduced the num­ber of peo­ple who did­n’t enjoy the video by 41 per­cent.

View­er enjoy­ment of brand­ed video was impor­tant because it had a direct impact on key brand met­rics. View­ers who enjoyed the video they watched demon­strat­ed 139 per­cent high­er brand asso­ci­a­tion, 97 per­cent high­er pur­chase intent, 35 per­cent high­er brand favor­a­bil­i­ty, and 14 per­cent high­er brand recall than their coun­ter­parts who did­n’t enjoy the video.

Six­ty-eight per­cent of view­ers who had browsed to the video cor­rect­ly recalled the brand when prompt­ed, com­pared to 73 per­cent of view­ers who had arrived at the video fol­low­ing a rec­om­men­da­tion. This 7 per­cent uplift sug­gests that video view­ers are in a more recep­tive and atten­tive frame of mind fol­low­ing a rec­om­men­da­tion, allow­ing brands that pro­duce and dis­trib­ute social con­tent to ben­e­fit from clos­er com­mu­ni­ca­tion with their audi­ences.

Rec­om­men­da­tions caused a 7 per­cent increase in brand asso­ci­a­tion: agree­ment with key brand state­ments increased from 41 per­cent among view­ers who had browsed to the video to 44 per­cent among view­ers who seen the video fol­low­ing a rec­om­men­da­tion. This result rein­forces the above sug­ges­tion that rec­om­men­da­tions make view­ers more recep­tive to brand mes­sag­ing.

There was also a drop of more than one-fifth in the num­ber of respon­dents that dis­agreed with key brand state­ments. Rec­om­men­da­tions have a large role to play for brands in chang­ing off-mes­sage per­cep­tions amongst their audi­ences as well as in active­ly cul­ti­vat­ing on-mes­sage per­cep­tions.

View­ers of the social videos test­ed went on to per­form a mul­ti­tude of brand or video relat­ed actions, notably 49 per­cent of view­ers pur­chased the adver­tised prod­uct with­in three days of the view. Thir­ty-eight per­cent of view­ers spoke to some­one in per­son about the video, show­ing a social video view to stim­u­late real life con­ver­sa­tion: what starts online becomes inter­change­able with real life in the minds of today’s con­sumers.

Inter­est­ing­ly, online shar­ing and email­ing of the link are imme­di­ate reac­tions, high­light­ing the need for shar­ing func­tion­al­i­ty with­in a video play­er – users don’t come back and share a video lat­er, it is a spon­ta­neous exer­cise. Nine per­cent of users searched for the brand, and 4 per­cent of users searched for prod­ucts of that type: social video view­ing is hav­ing an effect across all aspects of the pur­chase fun­nel.

Social Video Significantly Increases Brand Attention

This research demon­strates that the pow­er of social video lies in the rec­om­men­da­tion to view con­tent. This rec­om­men­da­tion comes not only from peers in social media envi­ron­ments, but also from author­i­ta­tive blogs and news sources cov­er­ing adver­tis­er con­tent edi­to­ri­al­ly. The impact of the rec­om­men­da­tion on con­sumers is con­sid­er­able:

• View­ers are more like­ly to enjoy a video when it has been rec­om­mend­ed than when encoun­tered through brows­ing (14 per­cent high­er enjoy­ment).
• View­ers are more like­ly to recall a brand name when the social video has been rec­om­mend­ed than when encoun­tered through brows­ing (7 per­cent high­er recall).
• View­ers are more like­ly to engage with an ad’s mes­sages when the social has been rec­om­mend­ed than when encoun­tered through brows­ing (10 per­cent high­er brand asso­ci­a­tion).

Ulti­mate­ly, enjoy­ment of the video cor­re­lat­ed pos­i­tive­ly with all test­ed brand met­rics in the sales fun­nel, includ­ing brand favor­a­bil­i­ty and final pur­chase intent.

Go Beyond ‘Views’ To Measure Video Marketing Strategy Success

Nev­er­the­less, some mar­keters will want to look beyond video shar­ing and mea­sure results using met­rics like lead gen­er­a­tion or online pur­chas­es. That means they will also want to look at cus­tom video play­ers which enhance the native play­er of YouTube or oth­er video hosts.

For exam­ple, Vin­ja Video recent­ly released the pub­lic beta of its cloud-based soft­ware. Using Vin­ja makes online videos easy for vis­i­tors to browse (i.e., quick­ly scan and ran­dom­ly access the most inter­est­ing parts – just like any web page), share deep-links to spe­cif­ic chapters/clips and for busi­ness­es to track those actions so that they can opti­mize their video pre­sen­ta­tion to max­i­mize their busi­ness objec­tives (e.g., dri­ve more prod­uct sales).

The­CUBE, the lead­ing live inter­view show cov­er­ing enter­prise tech­nol­o­gy and inno­va­tion, is using Vin­ja in B2B Tech. Vin­ja is a sim­ple, but pow­er­ful, mech­a­nism to expose the con­tent with­in rel­a­tive­ly long-form videos, but ulti­mate­ly the exposed con­tent needs to rel­e­vant and valu­able, or better/deeper expo­sure is moot.

ULTA Beau­ty, the largest beau­ty retail­er of pres­tige, mass, and salon prod­ucts in the Unit­ed States, is using Vin­ja to brand and enhance exist­ing “haul videos.” These videos fea­ture a series of prod­ucts in 5–12 minute videos which Vin­ja enables ULTA to seg­ment and link to respec­tive prod­uct pur­chase pages.

In short, mar­keters can and should go beyond “views” to mea­sure the suc­cess of their video mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy.